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Originally Posted by Skip Towne
I remember high school games back in the mid '50's. But the single wing stuff is getting kind of rusty. When I played we ran the split T formation. (So did Oklahoma when they won 47 straight games). Have you ever heard of the sidesaddle T? It looked a lot like the wishbone but had nuances. I never did understand the double wing formation. I didn't see enough of it. Marv Levy's Wing T was pretty effective since the other pro coaches had never seen it. There were no wide receivers before about 1961. That evolved from an innovation called the "Lonesome End" created by Paul Dietzel at Army. He rarely went to the huddle. They flashed him hand signals. His name was Carpenter and as an Army Captain, he called in napalm on his own unit as they were being overrun by Vietcong. Dietzel then moved to LSU where he created the platoon system. He had three separate teams. The White team (defense) The Go team (offense) and the Chinese Bandits (special teams). The "I" formation showed up about '65 and survives to this day. Come and gone include the Wishbone and the Houston Veer. Everybody ran the Wishbone until a Nebraska DC solved it by "mirroring " it. It then disappeared quickly. I'm not sure when the "Pro Set" offense appeared but I'm guessing early '70's. and it survives. So yes, my head is full of football from 50 years of watching it. Yours will be too 40 years from now.
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I've only been watching football for 40 years, but I thought that Sid Gillman introduced the Pro Set in the 50's with the Rams.
That, of course, was before my time.
I'm just thinking that I read that somewhere, but I also realize that I could have a faulty memory, since it's been as long ago as high school years that I was reading about Gillman and the Rams.